[Tex/LaTex] Number of lines in double spacing (compared to Word)

formattingline-spacingmswordsetspace

I am a newbie to LaTeX. I noticed that my document is almost a page longer in Word compared to LaTeX. (~7.25 in latex, ~8.25 in Word). This seems to be because my Word document has 23 lines per page, where my LaTeX document has 27. I think the margins are the same (I set them to be, but haven't measured them).

The beginning of my document looks like this:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage[margin=1.25in,top=1in,bottom=1in]{geometry}
\usepackage{textcomp}
\usepackage{setspace}
\doublespacing

…and that's pretty much all the formatting I have.

Is the default "double spacing" in LaTeX/setspace smaller than Word? How can I manually adjust this (in LaTeX)?

Best Answer

This is (mainly) because the \doublespacing that is the equivalent to \setstretch{1.667} is not the exact equivalent to the double lines in Word.

To reduce 27 to 23 lines you can use: 

\usepackage{setspace}
\setstretch{2}

Or simpler: 

\linespread{2} % without any package.

Same effect: 

\baselineskip=29pt %in the body of the document

With lineno you can test quickly this settings: 

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage[margin=1.25in,top=1in,bottom=1in]{geometry}
\linespread{2} 
\usepackage{lineno}
\linenumbers
\begin{document}
\lipsum[1-10]
\end{document}
Related Question